


Pride and Love

by ohthewhomanity (katzsoa)



Series: And You'll Have A Place In It [4]
Category: DuckTales (Cartoon 2017)
Genre: Asexual Character, Asexuality, F/F, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Lesbian Character, Pride, Self-Discovery, Weblena Week, Weblena Week 2018, discussion of sexuality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-20
Updated: 2018-10-20
Packaged: 2019-08-04 17:51:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16351301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katzsoa/pseuds/ohthewhomanity
Summary: “Lenalenalenalenalenaaaaa! There’s a word for it! There’s a word for it!!!”For Weblena Week Day 7 – Free Day!





	Pride and Love

**Author's Note:**

> I've been wanting to write this one for a while.

“‘Duckburg Pride Parade’?” Webby read aloud from the brightly-rainbow-colored flyer in her hands.

“Someone left a bunch of those in the staff mailboxes at the Money Bin,” said Lena. “And they’ve been posted around downtown, too. Seems legit.”

They were sitting on the bed in Lena’s room, down the hall from the loft – Webby just returned from a Duck Kids kayaking mini-adventure, and Lena back from her sort-of-job, if-CPS-asks-it’s-just-an-after-school-internship at Scrooge’s office.

“I haven’t heard of this,” said Webby. “What’s the parade proud of?”

“I’ve been around one or two – back when I was traveling across Europe. It’s about pride in yourself, mainly in your sexuality. People wave flags and wear the colors that represent different parts of their identities.” Lena tapped the flyer. “The rainbow’s the gay pride flag. You know, homosexual.”

“Yeah, I know what ‘gay’ means,” said Webby. “Both the ‘happy’ definition and the ‘attracted to people of the same gender’ one.”

“There are other groups that march at Pride, too,” Lena continued. “Like, some girls who like girls prefer ‘lesbian’ instead of ‘gay.’ That’s me, there.”

“How did you know? That you liked girls.”

Lena thought about it for a few moments, and shrugged. “I never really had anyone telling me I shouldn’t. No one kept me long enough to really invest in passing on their ideologies, not that I can remember. This one foster dad, he’d call me a lot of things I’m not gonna repeat, homophobic stuff. But I didn’t need him to tell me what I was. I just, knew. Never wanted to kiss a guy, but I did want that, and more, with girls. And then one day I heard the word for it, and it just, clicked. Like, yeah, that’s me. I’m a lesbian. Okay. Cool.”

Webby nodded slowly. “What other groups are there, at Pride?”

“There’s bisexual people,” said Lena. “That’s being attracted to more than one gender. So is pansexual. Different flag, but I think it’s just, whichever word feels more right to you. I can’t speak for them, though. And then there are gender groups – trans people, and nonbinary people – people whose gender isn’t the gender that the doctor shouted out when they were born.”

“I don’t think I’m any of those things,” said Webby.

“Allies can go to Pride, too,” said Lena. “You know, straight people who support their friends and family.”

“I’m not straight, though, either,” said Webby, her feet tapping a nervous rhythm against the side of the mattress. “At least, I don’t think I am. I’ve never been attracted to a guy. Besides wanting to be their friend, but I know this isn’t about that. It’s about sex and rom-coms and all the other stuff I don’t get, and I’ve never felt like that about _anyone._ My sexuality is ‘nope,’ I guess, if that’s a thing, but what if it _isn’t_ a thing, what if it’s weird, like, _really_ weird, something’s-wrong-with-me weird?”

“Trust me, Webby, on the list of things that are weird about the people in this mansion, you not being attracted to anyone doesn’t even break the top two hundred.”

“But I don’t know if it’s normal, either! For all I know, this could mean that something in me is broken!”

“Webby.” Lena set a hand on Webby’s knee, holding the trembling limb still. “You are literally the smartest person I know, in your incredibly specific kind of smartness. Why stress so much over something you don’t know?”

“Pursuing the unknown is, like, the foundation of adventure,” said Webby. “Solving mysteries is fun.”

“Not when it’s making you this freaked out.” Lena retracted her hand, leaning back against the headboard. “How about you focus on what you _do_ know for a bit?”

Webby considered this. “Well… I do know that I love you.”

Lena held out for about three seconds (a new personal best) before hiding her face in her hands, her cheeks pink enough to rival Webby’s skirt and hot enough to warm her palms.

“Damn it, Webby…!”

Webby laughed. “You big softy.”

“Nope.” Lena gently kicked at her, nudging Webby off of the bed. “Out. Out you get. Leave me alone with what’s left of my dignity.”

Continuing to laugh, Webby allowed herself to be shooed out the door.

* * *

Webby walked aimlessly through the mansion until she found herself in the living room on the ground floor. For the moment, she was alone, but being alone while knowing that there were people behind doors or who would be back later, people who were her family and wanted to spend time with her, was different than the kind of alone she’d known for the first decade-plus of her life. This was a much better kind of alone.

Still, alone meant alone with one’s thoughts, and once she was done laughing at Lena’s persistent, insistent refusal to acknowledge her softer side, her mind went back to its topic du jour: her sexuality, or lack thereof.

Webby was different from other teens in a lot of ways, both quantifiable and unquantifiable. She knew this. In a lot of ways, she didn’t want to be like other teens. For instance, most teens weren’t good at untying themselves and getting the upper hand on their would-be kidnappers. The triplets had made it very clear to Webby that this was a _very good thing_ to be different about, and she was proud of her skills.

But adding yet another thing to the long list of things that made her different still felt… not especially _bad,_ but certainly unpleasant.

None of the labels that Lena had rattled off had felt like a fit to Webby, and it gave her the feeling like being a new kind of fruit in the grocery store, while some poor employee tasked with putting the right label on her stood baffled, sticker gun held loose in their hand.

That should have been a funny image, but it didn’t make her feel better.

Webby plopped herself on the couch. Louie would have suggested mindless internet surfing as a distraction, if he were there, and so she pulled out her phone with that intention.

She opened the browser, and sat staring at the empty search bar for a while.

Then she typed “sexuality is nope,” hit the little blue magnifying glass button, and waited – but for what, she didn’t know. She didn’t expect to get any results. Maybe she’d get a “did you mean…?” prompt.

She _certainly_ didn’t expect there to be _merchandise._

“‘My Sexual Preference Is Nope T-Shirt’?” Webby muttered, scrolling down the page. “‘My Sexual Preference Is Nope Coffee Mug’? Hang on…”

She clicked one of the links, scrolled past the purple-grey-black-white graphics, and there her eyes fell on the tags.

* * *

Sixty-five seconds later, she was racing back up the stairs of the mansion, shouting at the top of her lungs:

“Lenalenalenalenalenaaaaa! There’s a word for it! _There’s a word for it!!!_ ”

* * *

Lena had enough warning to turn her music back down to a conversation-appropriate level before Webby came barreling into her room and jumped up onto her bed.

“Asexuality!” she said, gesturing at her phone. “That’s the word for not being attracted to anyone! It’s a thing; there’s a word for it! And it says here at least one percent of the world is asexual, Lena! That’s like _seventy-five million_ people – it isn’t weird if it applies to millions of people!”

Webby kept scrolling through the webpages she’d found, relaying bits of information to Lena as they struck her.

“And it isn’t just one thing, being asexual I mean, it’s more like a spectrum. Or an umbrella. I like that, the ace umbrella! With all the different kinds of aces sheltered under it.”

“So here it says there’s a difference between sexual orientation and romantic orientation – like, the difference between wanting to have sex with someone and, I dunno, if you want to kiss them, I guess? So not having romantic attraction is aromantic… I might be that, too! Except I do like kissing you, sometimes. Hm, I gotta read more about that.”

“‘Squish’! What a great word! Like wanting to squish someone’s brains out with a hug, you wanna be their friend so badly! Oh, man, I squished on you _so hard_ when we met!”

After several of these exuberant exclamations of discovery, Webby finally realized that she was the only one saying anything. She looked up from her phone.

Lena was just watching her, an odd little smile on her face and in her eyes that Webby wasn’t sure she’d seen there before.

“What?” said Webby. “What’s that face for?”

“I love you,” said Lena.

Webby grinned, and tossed the phone aside, crawling over Lena to lie next to her, hugging her.

“I love you, too.”

* * *

“So, wait, run that by me one more time,” said Huey. “You think we’re in an alternate reality?”

“ _Yes,_ ” said Dewey. “I was just walking past Lena’s room, minding my own business, and I looked in and saw the girls, and they had _completely swapped aesthetics._ We’re talking Lena in pink, and Webby in purple and black! Let me tell you, it was a _huge_ relief to come in here and see you were still wearing red!”

“I see,” said Huey. “Wouldn’t we have noticed falling through a portal, or, how the heck do you get into an alternate universe, anyway?”

“I don’t know!” Dewey was pacing in front of the doorway nervously. “Normally I would go to Webby about this – alternate reality stuff is her kind of nerdy thing, not yours – but if she _is_ from another reality, then we can’t trust anything she says, now can we? Maybe _she’s_ the witch in this world!”

“False alarm!” Louie said, entering the room behind Dewey and slapping a cheerful hand onto his brother’s shoulder. “Webby’s wearing the ace pride flag as a cape, and Lena’s doing that thing where she pretends she doesn’t think that what Webby’s doing is the most adorable thing she’s ever seen. This is _definitely_ our home universe.”


End file.
